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Media Matters: O'Keefe's Latest NPR Bombshell Instantly Falls Apart

By FZ - Posted on 19 March 2011

March 17, 2011- Discredited conservative activist James O'Keefe is out with yet another NPR video, and its auteur took to Twitter to tease its SHOCKING REVELATION:

Yep, that's the big story, and in his narration to the tape O'Keefe delivers this breaking news: "Betsy Liley went on to explain that [an October 2010 grant] was not the first time George Soros' Open Society Institute had donated to NPR. In fact, the public will learn for the first time that George Soros' Open Society Foundation has donated to NPR in the past, starting as many as 15 years ago."

Actually, Soros and Open Society funding of NPR programming is not a secret. In fact, NPR has openly publicized the fact that they've received Soros and Open Society money.

Here's a 2000 NPR press release announcing that the Soros Foundation provided funding for an All Things Considered documentary on people who witness executions in Texas.

Witness to an Execution was funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Soros Foundation.

This American RadioWorks documentary aired on All Things Considered® from NPR News and was made possible through major funding by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, with additional project support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation, the U. S. Institute for Peace, and the Glaser Family Foundation.

This information was obtained via a Google search. It took less than 10 minutes to find and was quite literally the bare-minimum of fact-checking one could do.